Alibaba planning Turkish data center near Ankara

Alibaba is reportedly planning to develop a data center near the Turkish capital Ankara.

The Daily Sabah reports Alibaba President Michael Evan said the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba plans to invest more than $1 billion in the country, officially known as the Republic of Türkiye.

“There is a great production power in Türkiye, which is the most advantageous country in the world in this sense,” he said during a visit to Turkuvaz Media Group in Istanbul.

According to Reuters, the investment plan includes a logistics hub at Istanbul Airport and a data center outside Ankara in Temelli.

Details on potential specifications or timelines of the data center were not shared.

Alibaba Cloud operates a network of 28 cloud regions and 86 availability zones globally. 2022 saw Alibaba launch data centers in Bangkok, Thailand; Frankfurt Germany; and Tokyo, Japan.

Alibaba CEO Daniel Zhang recently took over control of the cloud unit amid a C-suite reshuffle that came weeks after a major outage.

None of the major US cloud providers have regions in Türkiye, which has a relatively small data center market. Equinix operates one facility in Istanbul it acquired from Zenium in 2017, while Telehouse also operates a facility there in partnership with Teknotel. There are also several local players including Glasshouse and TekNet. Last year Turkcell opened a new data center in Tekirdağ. DAMAC-backed Edgnex reportedly also has a project in the country. Data Center Dynamics